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This article explores the implications of Hegel’s Philosophy of World History with respect to colonialism. For Hegel, freedom can be recognized and practised only in classical, Christian and modern Europe; therefore, the world’s other peoples can acquire freedom only if Europeans impose their civilization upon them. Although this imposition denies freedom to colonized peoples, this denial is legitimate for Hegel because it is the sole condition on which these peoples can gain freedom in the longer term. The article then considers whether Hegel’s basic account of freedom can be extricated from his Eurocentric and pro-colonialist interpretation of the course of history. The article argues that matters are more complicated because that interpretation has significant connections with Hegel’s conception of freedom as self-determination.

In this article I consider whether Hegel is a naturalist or an anti-naturalist with respect to his philosophy of nature. I adopt a cluster-based approach to naturalism, on which positions are more or less naturalistic depending how many strands of the cluster naturalism they exemplify. I focus on two strands: belief that philosophy is continuous with the empirical sciences, and disbelief in supernatural entities. I argue that Hegel regards philosophy of nature as distinct, but not wholly discontinuous, from empirical science and that he believes in the reality of formal and final causes insofar as he is a realist about universal forms that interconnect to comprise a self-organizing whole. Nonetheless, for Hegel, natural particulars never fully realize these universal forms, so that empirical inquiry into these particulars and their efficient-causal interactions is always necessary. In these two respects, I conclude, Hegel's position sits in the middle of the naturalism/anti-naturalism spectrum.

Adorno and logic might seem to be a combination as unpromising as Nietzsche and democracy, or Sartre and Hinduism. Adorno has no logic in the sense of a theory of valid forms of argument and inference. He is also deeply hostile to any attempt to formalize thinking because, he believes, formal thinking disguises the complexities and ambiguities inherent in any subject-matter, making it impossible to reflect on them (CM: 245–6). To encourage genuinely reflective thought, Adorno writes in a fragmentary and allusive style far removed from the logically formalized style of much twentieth-century analytic philosophy.

Yet Adorno does engage with an alternative tradition in logic which Kant and Hegel developed. Kant's transcendental logic studies the basic concepts – such as reality and causality – by which (Kant thinks) we structure our experience. Hegel transformed this transcendental logic into dialectical logic. Hegel's logic deeply influenced Adorno's approach to the study of socio-historical phenomena, especially his account of how enlightenment turns into its opposite, myth. But Adorno also criticizes Hegel, transforming his dialectical logic into a negative dialectic. In its most general form, negative dialectics applies to relations between concepts and objects, or between what Adorno calls “identity thinking” and the “nonidentical”.

To understand Adorno's thinking about logic in this Kantian- Hegelian sense, we need to examine a cluster of concepts – those of negative dialectics, of concept and object, of identity and the nonidentical – as well as Adorno's concept of constellations which forms part of his account of negative dialectics.

The UK Food Standards Agency convened an international group of expert scientists to review the Agency-funded projects on diet and bone health in the context of developments in the field as a whole. The potential benefits of fruit and vegetables, vitamin K, early-life nutrition and vitamin D on bone health were presented and reviewed. The workshop reached two conclusions which have public health implications. First, that promoting a diet rich in fruit and vegetable intakes might be beneficial to bone health and would be very unlikely to produce adverse consequences on bone health. The mechanism(s) for any effect of fruit and vegetables remains unknown, but the results from these projects did not support the postulated acid–base balance hypothesis. Secondly, increased dietary consumption of vitamin K may contribute to bone health, possibly through its ability to increase the γ-carboxylation status of bone proteins such as osteocalcin. A supplementation trial comparing vitamin K supplementation with Ca and vitamin D showed an additional effect of vitamin K against baseline levels of bone mineral density, but the benefit was only seen at one bone site. The major research gap identified was the need to investigate vitamin D status to define deficiency, insufficiency and depletion across age and ethnic groups in relation to bone health.

I have suggested that, given the problems with Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference, we need to rethink it significantly, so as to argue that the historical suppression of sexual duality has simultaneously suppressed the natural multiplicity of our bodies, while a culture which expressed duality would equally express this multiplicity. To help with this rethinking of Irigaray's ideas, I proposed borrowing from Naturphilosophie, a tradition on which she herself draws. Having seen how she adapts Hölderlin's and Hegel's ideas of nature, we can review how, as a whole, she uses ideas from Naturphilosophie to support and flesh out her belief in natural duality. Through this review, we can start to bring together some alternative elements within this philosophical tradition which can support and flesh out the idea that human bodies are naturally internally multiple as well as sexed.

Irigaray takes up Hölderlin's idea that original nature (physis) divides itself into subjects and objective nature, but she argues that this self-division only spontaneously occurs in men. She explains that this self-division is caused by men's difficulties in separating from their mothers in infancy, given that the experienced sexual difference between (the rhythms of) boys and their mothers exacerbates the difficulties which this separation always involves. Irigaray maintains that men's self-division is manifested in their rejection of nature – both their own and that of women and the surrounding environment – and in their development of a technological, artificial culture.

Drawing on Schelling, I have proposed a rethinking of Irigaray's philosophy according to which nature's process of self-differentiation becomes restricted by a culture which denies sexual difference, and would be released by a culture which recognises that difference. In conclusion, I want to bring together the strands of my argument in this book and show how my rethinking of Irigaray combines the strengths of her philosophy with those of Butler's – at least when Butler's philosophy is revised to recognise the natural multiplicity of bodies. By reviewing the respective strengths of these philosophies as a whole, and showing how the theory of self-differentiating nature can reconcile them, I aim also to provide a more integrated statement of this theory as a contribution to feminist thinking about nature, bodies, and culture.

I introduced Irigaray's philosophy of natural sexual duality by reassessing feminist debates surrounding her essentialism. I argued that her later writings affirm a form of realist essentialism according to which human bodies naturally have inherent characters, which they actively strive to express culturally. Opposing the widely held view that realist essentialism is untenable, I suggested that Irigaray's later position is appealing because it revalues bodies, and nature more generally, as active and self-expressive, intertwining the project of creating a sexuate culture with that of learning to ‘respect the realities that compose the pre-given world: that of the macrocosm and that of living beings’ (BEW, 16/27–8).

I have suggested that Irigaray's philosophy of natural sexual duality is attractive insofar as she sees nature as dynamic and bodies as active and striving for expression, consequently proposing cultural change to give expression to nature generally and to female bodies, with their inherent rhythms, which have never achieved adequate expression in western culture. However, a revised version of Butler's approach to sex and gender, which rests on a notion of active, multiple, bodily forces, offers equivalent attractions: it regards bodily activity as responsible for a constant instability in gender norms which generates deep differences between women. This revised version of Butler's approach also prescribes that dualistic gender norms should be subverted to give greater expression to bodily forces. This latter approach to sex and gender is incompatible with that of Irigaray. These two approaches to sex and gender are premised on antithetical conceptions of human bodies as, respectively, internally diverse (and naturally non-sexed) or sexually dual. I have argued that each conception has some phenomenological support: the former articulates our embodied experience of having diverse pre-conscious impulses and energies; the latter articulates our sense of being constrained by bodily rhythms which have their own momentum, especially in respect of those processes (such as menstruation and pregnancy) which seem most plainly to be sexually specific. Following Irigaray's argument that an adequate account of human bodies, and of the nature within which they are located, must articulate pre-theoretical experience, we need an account of bodies and nature which coherently synthesises these opposed conceptions.

This book defends an understanding of sexual difference as natural, challenging the prevailing consensus within feminist theory that sexual difference is a culturally constructed and symbolically articulated phenomenon. The book supports this challenge with a distinctive interpretation and critical rethinking of Luce Irigaray's later philosophy of sexual difference. According to my interpretation, the later Irigaray sees sexual difference as a natural difference between the sexes, which should receive cultural and social expression. Opposing the dominant view that any idea that sexual difference is natural must be politically conservative and epistemologically naïve, I want to show that Irigaray's later conception of sexual difference is philosophically sophisticated and coherent, and supports a politics of change which – importantly – aspires not only to improve women's situations but also to revalue nature and to improve humanity's relations with the natural world. However, I will not simply defend the later Irigaray but will criticise her for overlooking what I call the natural multiplicity within each of our bodies: a multiplicity of forces and capacities such that we are never simply sexually specific. Given this problem, I shall argue, Irigaray's philosophy must be fundamentally rethought within the framework of a theory of nature as self-differentiating, a theory which can recognise the reality and value of bodily multiplicity as well as that of sexual duality.

The question of Irigaray's ‘essentialism’ has long been at the centre of controversy over the value of her work to feminist theory and politics. Yet the long-standing debates around Irigaray's essentialism may seem recently to have been laid to rest by the proliferation of scholarly investigations of the philosophical underpinnings of her thought, especially her thorough engagement with central themes from the history of philosophy. One might imagine this research to have decisively superseded tired discussions of Irigaray's essentialism, which, one might suppose, were insufficiently philosophically informed to yield significant insight into her work. Actually, though, preceding debates over Irigaray's work have generated a network of now-standard assumptions about essentialism which continue to inform the otherwise diverse ways in which she is currently read.

In particular, those earlier debates have inspired a now-widespread assumption that no realist form of essentialism is acceptable and that, accordingly, Irigaray can only be read as essentialist in some distinctively non-realist sense. By ‘realism’, I mean the view that we can know about the world as it is independently of our practices and modes of representation. I therefore understand a realist form of essentialism to consist of the view that male and female bodies can be known to have essentially different characters, different characters which really exist, independently of how we represent and culturally inhabit these bodies. Realist essentialism, then, can equally be expressed as the view that natural differences between the sexes exist, prior to our cultural activities.

In Chapter 1, I traced how Irigaray turns away from her early project of redefining and revaluing the symbolically female. I suggested that we can see, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference in particular, that Irigaray comes to believe that this earlier project presupposes a conceptual hierarchy which privileges (tacitly male) culture over (tacitly female) matter and nature, a presupposition which conflicts with the project's aim ofrevaluing matter and the female. Irigaray therefore reconceives sexual difference as primarily natural rather than symbolic, urging that social and political institutions be transformed to give expression and recognition to this natural difference. Her philosophy of natural sexual difference is fruitful in that it consistently undermines the culture/nature conceptual hierarchy and justifies a politics which aims, simultaneously, to end women's exploitation and the degradation of the natural environment. In view of this fruitfulness, I have suggested, Irigaray's philosophy of natural sexual difference merits further examination, despite its problems. Yet Irigaray's later philosophy would, after all, be undeserving of further examination should there exist an alternative feminist theory with the same conceptual and political attractions but no comparable problems. Arguably, this alternative exists in the guise of Judith Butler's theory of gender, which offers the most fully and coherently developed alternative to Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference. No defence of Irigaray's philosophy can carry conviction, then, unless it proceeds by way of a reconstruction and assessment of Butler's theory of gender.

Irigaray's philosophy of natural sexual difference is potentially fruitful in promising to revalue nature and bodies by attributing self-expressive agency to them, and in promoting social change to give nature and bodies expression and recognition. But this philosophy is challenged by Butler's theory of gender. According to the revised and strengthened version of this theory which I have proposed, bodies are composed of multiple forces which actively pursue self-enhancement, and which seek political change to encourage this pursuit, in the form of the subversion of gender categories. To decide which approach to embrace, we need, crucially, to ascertain which conception of bodies (if either) is true: Irigaray's conception of natural bodily duality or the competing conception of bodily multiplicity. We need to explore Irigaray's reasons for postulating natural sexual duality and ask what countervailing reasons might support an ontology of bodily multiplicity. This chapter will conclude that some considerations support each ontology, and that we therefore need to develop a theory on which human bodies are naturally both sexed and internally multiple.

In Section I, I examine how Irigaray supports her belief in natural sexual duality with a philosophy according to which nature, as a whole, obeys polar rhythms which find their fullest manifestation in human sexual dimorphism. As Sections II and III explore, this philosophy of nature leads Irigaray to a concomitant rethinking of sexual difference as consisting, ultimately, in a difference between basic rhythms which regulate the development of male and female bodies and forms of experience.